Month: January 2016

Members of the Brandeis GPS Community may submit job postings from within their industries to advertise exclusively to our community. This is a great way to further connect and seek out opportunities as they come up. If you are interested in posting an opportunity, please complete the following form found here.

As part of the Information Security team, you will be helping to ensure that the company’s information resources are secure from unauthorized access and protected from inappropriate alteration, while supporting the needs of Commonwealth users. Doing so will have you operating as an in-house consultant, responsible for designing, implementing, supporting, and maintaining policies and security solutions in both operational and customer-hosted environments.

Raising awareness and educating end users are the two best lines of defense when it comes to protecting a company’s information security. As the marketing and training specialist, you will help the company do just that. By developing, coordinating, and delivering a variety of security-focused training and marketing content, you will be helping to promote Commonwealth and industry best practices throughout the organization.

Job-sharing and recruiting website Glassdoor just announced the 25 best jobs in America for the upcoming year. Unsurprisingly, jobs related to data analytics and software engineering dominated the list:

Glassdoor based their ranking on the number of available positions, salary, and career opportunities. Many of the part-time, online master’s degrees at Brandeis GPS directly correlate with the fields and industries Glassdoor identified as playing a critical role in the 2016 job market. Follow the links below for more information on these programs.

Data is increasing with the use of learning technologies, and data is being produced at virtually every learning footprint. The next step in the process is to take the data and analyze the connections to improve the entire learning experience.

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about the learners and their contexts for the purpose of understanding and optimizing learning and the environment in which it occurs. [1]

Learning analytics has been around for some time. Its origin can be traced to business intelligence and to predicting consumer behavior. Learning analytics in education has emerged in the last few
decades, and it follows similar analysis and predictive relationships. Learning analytics is growing to keep pace with deciphering patterns from huge data sets to further support and personalize the learning experience.

My interest in learning analytics stems from my research on learning style preferences. The hypothesis was that, if you could determine a user’s learning style preference, then you could optimally display content in a form to best suit the way a learner could interpret it; you could support their success. At that time, most analysis had to be completed prior to the learning, and then you could track users accordingly. Real-time data analysis was in its infancy. The vision then was that, in the future, this could be done via machine learning, with data analysis and dynamically serving up content in a format that learners best understood. Today, those capabilities exist in some learning management systems in the form of learning analytics and adaptive learning.

Currently, most learning management systems are able to track a student’s footprint throughout a course. It can document when a user logs in and logs out, and they can determine the type of content they viewed and for how long. They can also alert students to assignments, assessments and most course requirements, including their status within each course. Some learning systems have dashboards that indicate the students’ progress compared to their expectations and compared to their cohorts’ performance.

In my opinion, most learning management systems are good at data reporting, but they fall short in data analysis and in relationships. The challenge is to harness the data and to make reasonable connections, so that meaningful, positive and proactive interventions can be made; ultimately, we hope to improve the instructional process and student success.

Why use learning analytics:

Learning analytics has relevance and usefulness across various groups, including instructors, students, instructional designers and institutions.

Instructors:

Instructors can use learner analytics to gain insight into student progress:

Course navigation paths

Most popular content

Reflection time

Problem-solving

Measurement of student engagement and participation

Assignment and assessment completion

Analytics can also be used as an early warning system for at-risk students; they can trigger appropriate messaging.

Students:

Students can use learner analytics to gain insight into their progress:

Seeing their progress and grades

Tracking their progress against course requirements

Comparing their progress with their cohorts

Tracking content and resources

Instructional designers:

As computer technologies develop and more learning components are online, it is essential for learning specialists to evaluate the impact of each emerging technology and to investigate the strengths, weaknesses and appropriate applications for the learners. Sometimes, this is in the form of a retrospective analysis, but increasingly this analysis can be done closer to the time of the event for more agile course adjustments.

Learning analytics can also be used for continuous improvement of the learning design, such as increasing learner engagement, expanding knowledge retention and improving course and program
outcomes.

Institutions:

Learning analytics can be applied at the institutional level for reporting usage trends. In the future, courses could have personality profiles based on course metadata. These items could include tags, such as “projects-based learning,” “discussions,” “hybrid” and “synchronous.” Each metadata tag could also have an associated strength. Each student would also have his or her own evolving learning personality profile.

This data matching would be similar to how Amazon recommends products based on a customer’s purchasing history and behavior. To optimize student success, the recommendation engine architecture could suggest courses that best match the profiles and that mesh with individual learning styles.

Learning analytics—one view but not the whole picture:

It would be short sighted to think that the landscape of learning analytics is only within the confines of an online learning management system. It is increasingly apparent that the majority of learning
occurs outside of the learning management system; it is only the tip of the iceberg. Learning also occurs informally, such as through social media, experiences and discussions. Learning analytics should be inclusive, capturing all learning opportunities. The Experience API (xAPI) has been developed as a mechanism to record and track all types of learning experiences. Ultimately, inclusion of this learning data will broaden analysis and connections. However, in my experience in piloting the xAPI, it is more elusive than reality. It will take time for the experiential footprints to be folded into the mix of the learning data.

Summary:

Learning analytics is not a one-time, one-size-fits-all approach. It is dynamic, as the parts of the system change and grow. Learning analytics is an emerging field that can benefit many; it has the potential of being a significant factor in improving the overall learning experience in educational institutions or in corporate training.

Categories

Follow GPS on Twitter

For the first time ever, the city of Boston will be hosting Boston FinTech Week, a four-day event featuring some of the world’s biggest and brightest financial services institutions and the people behind them. Sponsored in part by Brandeis GPS, Boston FinTech Week (which runs from September 11-14) is a collection of conferences, networking opportunities, […]

By Nicole Russo I don’t think that I realized this at the time, but a major contributing factor in my pursuit of a career in higher education was community. In my own undergraduate experience, I felt support from my fellow peers, as well as mentorship and guidance from the faculty and staff. I had not […]

After starting his master’s as an undergraduate, a Brandeis University alumnus proves that full-time work and graduate school can co-exist. Three days after graduating from Brandeis University with a BS in Health: Science, Society, and Policy (HSSP) and a minor in Economics, Allan Chuang (class of 2017) enrolled in the university’s Health and Medical Informatics […]

By Mike Storiale When FinTech began its ascent, single-solution providers opened the door to expertise and simplicity rarely brought to the table by traditional banks. Solutions designed to meet unique needs created excitement from consumers and investors alike. Throughout the industry, experts discussed the need for an open architecture from banks and FinTechs to empower […]

By Lance Eaton That’s always the first question I get when I tell people that I am an instructional designer (an ID for those of us “in the know”). It all started when I was 6 years old, and my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I peered up […]

It was so good to see Brandeis University alumni at #DeisReunion17 last weekend! In case you missed us at the festivities on campus, we want to make sure you know about the Brandeis alumni tuition discount on all Graduate Professional Studies courses and programs. Whether you’re looking to obtain a master’s degree or supplement your […]

It’s been a few weeks since the GPS class of 2017 commencement ceremony. Congratulations once again to those who received their degree! We’re checking in to remind all GPS alumni – past and recent – about your tuition discount and an important change to our academic calendar. Starting in fall 2017, GPS will be moving […]

Members of the Brandeis GPS Community may submit job postings from within their industries to advertise exclusively to our community. This is a great way to further connect and seek out opportunities as they come up. If you are interested in posting an opportunity, please complete the following form found here. Where: Cambridge, MA About: […]

Members of the Brandeis GPS Community may submit job postings from within their industries to advertise exclusively to our community. This is a great way to further connect and seek out opportunities as they come up. If you are interested in posting an opportunity, please complete the following form found here. Where: REsurety, Boston, MA […]

The Rabb School of Continuing Studies awarded diplomas to more than 100 GPS students at its 2017 commencement ceremony this Sunday, May 21. Approximately 45 members of the graduating class attended the event, which took place on campus from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Faculty Club. “Not only have you mastered a rigorous curriculum, […]